I Ran

Around the block, essentially, but it is a big block, encompassing a fine park and a busy intersection and lots of houses bigger and better than my own, which I have previously mentioned, is completely in disarray.

Pish. When I was getting home, (breathless after a twenty minute waddle), I looked at old Mrs. Lam's house. It's a detached house that sits on a corner looking bigger and better than mine. But Mrs. Lam is a quiet widow, who barely says hello, not in her language, which I speak in bits and chunks, and not in English, either. I looked at her house expecting not to see her, but to see her parking spots. They are big. I lust after them. They are empty. Mrs. Lam has a two door garage and no cars. Mrs. Lam, I think, is my Richard Cory. But that's another story, for another day.

I saw her this morning, but she was not with her friends heading toward the park to do T'ai Chi. She was not shuffling up the street with her hand cupped to her mouth chattering with two old women who look, to the passing eye, almost identical to each other. She was standing in the cage that marks the end of her house and the start of her garage. She was wearing a big red down parka. And she was swinging her arms around in a smooth, seamless high-speed version of T'ai Chi. I felt ashamed for looking in at her, and if she felt gawked at, she did not show it. She did not seem to see me.

For me, this neighbourhood, this whole place, is about me, about landing and being here and getting to know the terrain and understand why I am here. For Mrs. Lam, it is something entirely different. She told a neighbour that she will die in that house, because her husband did. Because it's the only place where her body belongs. I suppose she thinks someone else can figure out what to do with her remains. But I don't know. I don't know Mrs. Lam. I only know that she exercises in the morning- not out in the open like me, chugging past suit-clad humans on the way to work on their bikes smoking cigarettes, and women pushing strollers and pretending not to notice their dogs taking a dump behind them. If she doesn't see it, she doesn't need to scoop it up.

Not like me, out in the open. I am not Mrs. Lam. Her house is bigger. It is detached. She exercises in a cage. Until her friends come, anyway.